Sen. Nye assails ‘Merchants of Death': Sept. 4, 1934

On this day in 1934, the Senate Munitions Committee met for the first time in the Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to investigate whether armsmakers had unduly influenced the U.S. decision to enter World War I in 1917.

To chair the seven-member special committee, the Senate’s Democratic majority chose Sen. Gerald Nye, a North Dakota Republican. Nye pledged that “when the Senate investigation is over, we shall see that war and preparation for war is not a matter of national honor and national defense, but a matter of profit for the few.”

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As the specter of new wars spread across Europe in the mid-1930s, concern mounted in the United States that “merchants of death” would once more unnecessarily drag the nation into a foreign conflict. Nye triggered the creation of the panel with a resolution calling for a probe of the U.S. munitions industry.

Over the next 18 months, the “Nye Committee” held 93 hearings. It questioned more than 200 witnesses, including J. P. Morgan Jr. and Pierre du Pont. Alger Hiss, who was later convicted of perjury in a Communist spy case, served as the committee’s legal counsel.

Senate historians found that the committee proved unable to come up with any hard evidence of an active conspiracy among armsmakers. Nevertheless, the panel’s reports fed widespread popular feeling against “greedy munitions interests.”

According to the U.S. Senate website: “The investigation came to an abrupt end early in 1936. The Senate cut off committee funding after Chairman Nye blundered into an attack on the late Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. Nye suggested that Wilson had withheld essential information from Congress as it considered a declaration of war.

“Democratic leaders, including Appropriations Committee Chairman Carter Glass of Virginia, unleashed a furious response against Nye for 'dirt-daubing the sepulcher of Woodrow Wilson.' Standing before cheering colleagues in a packed Senate chamber, Glass slammed his fist onto his desk until blood dripped from his knuckles.”

Nevertheless, the Nye panel helped inspire passage of congressional neutrality acts in the mid-1930s that signaled profound American opposition to overseas involvement. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, like Wilson a Democrat, succeeded in changing the national mood somewhat, particularly after Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, triggering World War II. Nevertheless, the isolationists remained a major factor in U.S. politics until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

After losing his Senate seat in 1944 to a Democratic rival, Nye and his family lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

A lifelong smoker, Nye had arterial disease; the arteries in his legs were surgically replaced with plastic ones. A blood clot went to his lung. While recovering from that experience, but still weak, a doctor mistakenly prescribed a drug containing penicillin, to which Nye was known to be allergic. As a result, he died on July 17, 1971, at the age of 78.